As the Records Show
Notes on Memoirs and Place Names in Ireland
Sherry Irvine, CGRS, FSA Scot
Mention memoirs today and most people think of an account of personal experience. As with many words, usage has altered over time, not to the extent that earlier interpretations have disappeared from dictionaries, but certainly from common understanding. At one time memoir meant note, memorandum, or record; and in the plural referred to proceedings of learned societies or official reports of business done.
Ordinance Survey Memoirs
This last definition (given a date of 1829 in my Oxford Dictionary) certainly relates to the material collected and written to accompany the mapping of Ireland undertaken by the Ordnance Survey in the 1830s, a preliminary to a new valuation of property in Ireland.
These recorded observations of map surveyors are known as the Ordnance Survey Memoirs. Due to expense, the work was neither completed nor published at the time. Most of the information is about Northern Ireland; six counties have excellent coverage (Antrim, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry, Tyrone), another-Donegal--has some, and there are fragments from five others--Cavan, Leitrim, Louth, Monaghan, and Sligo. A list of all parishes covered by the series can be found online.
The memoirs contain extensive notes about local features and conditions that could not be depicted on the maps. These notes include descriptions of the landscape, e.g., buildings (humble and great, civil and religious), ancient structures; and the people, e.g., employment, migration, charitable work, social activities, common names. Altogether the description is a remarkably detailed account of a significant part of Ireland 175 years ago.
Queen's University at Belfast has published all the memoirs in forty volumes, and they have attracted a great deal of interest from local and family historians. The website given above contains a link to a list of what is in each volume. Volumes can be ordered online from the Queen's University bookshop (www.queensbookshop.com) or from major booksellers.
Place Names
One way or another, through reading or research, you become aware of place names; or you may be eagerly looking forward to studying the Memoirs in detail once the origins of your ancestor are known. Geographical information and place name information in particular, are fundamental to Irish genealogical research. There is history in place names as they tell something of the land, the people, and patterns of settlement.
Sometimes it is extremely difficult to discover the parish or townland where your ancestors lived, and some place names, preserved in family papers, cannot be found on maps.
Not only does Queen's University publish the Ordnance Survey Memoirs, it also supports study of place names in Northern Ireland. The Northern Ireland Place Name Project is based at the university in Belfast. In November it announced the publication of another volume in the series Place-Names of Northern Ireland--"Lisnaskea and District: the Parish of Aghalurcher," by Dr Patrick McKay. Aghalurcher contains 238 townlands and is situated entirely in east Fermanagh, except for 17 townlands that lie east of Fivemiletown in County Tyrone. This is the eighth volume in the series and the first for county Fermanagh. The others are:
- Volume I, Newry and South-west Down,
- Volume II, The Ards Peninsula,
- Volume III, The Mournes,
- Volume IV, The Baronies of Toome,
- Volume V, The Moyola Valley,
- Volume VI, North-West Co. Down: the Barony of Iveagh,
- Volume VII, Ballycastle and North-East Antrim.
These books are also available from the Queens University bookshop and major book retailers.
Work in Progress
When I wrote about townlands for the "Ancestry Daily News" four years ago, I made reference to the "Northern Ireland Place-Name Project" and its database. Dr. Kay Muhr and her colleagues have continued to build the database. It includes all place names and locations shown on the 1:50,000 map of Northern Ireland, townlands, civil parishes, and baronies for Antrim, Armagh, Down, Derry, Fermanagh, and Tyrone, as well as information on spellings and sources. New data is being added, notably landowners and family names connected with the places.
For information on the project, enquires, and contributions, please read my earlier articles and visit www.qub.ac.uk/lla/cel/placenameproject.htm.
RELATED ARTICLES BY SHERRY IRVINE
Related Articles by Sherry Irvine
"Irish Townlands: Beyond the Definition" (Sept. 2000)
"Townlands: Focus on Northern Ireland" (Jan 2001)
Sherry Irvine, CGRS, FSA (Scot) is an author, teacher, and lecturer specializing in English and Scottish family history. She is the author of Your English Ancestry (2d ed, 1998) and Your Scottish Ancestry (1997), and she is a regular contributor to several journals including Genealogical Computing. Since 1996, she has been a study tour leader, course coordinator, and instructor for the Institute of Genealogy and Historical Research at Samford University. She teaches online for the family history program of Vermont College and has lectured at conferences in Canada, the United States, and Australia. She is past president of the Association of Professional Genealogists.
Copyright 2005, MyFamily.com.
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The Spoken Word
Last year I went to the funeral of a cousin in Kentucky's Knob country. It was good to recall the soft, sweet sounds of conversation I knew half century ago. And I came away understanding why family members wrote one great-grandmother's name as Courtney Spencer, while documents dictated by my unschooled relatives cite the name as "Cotney." And I realized why I had so much difficulty finding the family of another great grandmother. Her name was Angeline Orr, not the phonetic "Arrow" listed by the clerk in 1860.
Sometimes there is no better resource than the spoken word.
David Baker
Owensboro, Kentucky
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